Archive for March, 2017

Last season Anne Teresa De Keersmaker, one of my favorite contemporary choreographers, brought her company to BAM with a piece called Vortex Temporum, which featured the music group Ictus playing live the score by Gerard Grisey. On the big stage it looked like an exercise in chaos theory, somewhat dry and academic. ATDK reconceived the piece as a nine-hour museum exhibition, which is currently having a five-day run in the Atrium at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s pretty cool to go and sit and watch the performers do their concentrated thing just inches away from you (the audience is encouraged to sit not just along the perimeter but anywhere in the space — the performers will move around you, including the musicians). I caught the last hour of the exhibition on Friday March 31.

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The excellent reporting routinely published in the New Yorker has the simultaneously invigorating and depressing impact of adding to my pantheon of political villains. Latest addition: Robert Mercer, co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, among the most profitable hedge funds in the country, and his daughter Rebekah. Apparently, we have these people and their wealth to thank for putting the current president and two of his key advisors — Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway — in the positions of power they currently occupy.

Jane Mayer, one of the New Yorker’s best veteran reporters, last year published Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. She continues her mission of exposing the hidden influence of wealthy right-wing political ideologues with “Trump’s Money Man,” her long article on Mercer, whom I — and I suspect you — have never heard of. With a doggedness similar to that with which Rachel Maddow is exposing the Trump administration’s financial ties to Putin and his Russian cronies, Mayer connects the dots between Patrick Caddell, the former Democratic pollster, Citizens United, Breitbart News, the Council for National Policy, the Koch Brothers, the Club for Growth, Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute, and Mercer (without whom, one source opines, “Trump wouldn’t be President”).

It’s a long wonky read that most people won’t finish, so I’ll cull several passages that induced mounting horror in me as I made my way through the piece.

That tweet calling the news media “the enemy of the American people”? Mayer writes: “The President is known for tweeting impulsively, but in this case his words weren’t spontaneous: they clearly echoed the thinking of Caddell, Bannon, and Mercer. In 2012, Caddell gave a speech at a conference sponsored by Accuracy in Media, a conservative watchdog group, in which he called the media ‘the enemy of the American people.’ That declaration was promoted by Breitbart News, a platform for the pro-Trump alt-right, of which Bannon was the executive chairman, before joining the Trump Administration. One of the main stakeholders in Breitbart News is Mercer.”

Mayer relies heavily on two sources currently or formerly employed by Renaissance Technologies, Nick Patterson and David Magerman. Patterson, who recruited Mercer from IBM,

doesn’t share Mercer’s libertarian views, or what he regards as his susceptibility to conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton. During Bill Clinton’s Presidency, Patterson recalled, Mercer insisted at a staff luncheon that Clinton had participated in a secret drug-running scheme with the C.I.A. The plot supposedly operated out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas. “Bob told me he believed that the Clintons were involved in murders connected to it,” Patterson said. Two other sources told me that, in recent years, they had heard Mercer claim that the Clintons have had opponents murdered.

Mercer strongly supported Jeff Sessions as Trump’s candidate for Attorney General and has argued that the Civil Rights Act was a major mistake. He subsidizes the research of climate-change skeptic Arthur Robinson’s Oregon Institute of Science and medicine. He is a gun enthusiast with his own private pistol range, and he’s part owner of a company that claims to have the largest private cache of machine guns in the US.

In the 2016 campaign, Mercer gave $22.5 million in disclosed donations to Republican candidates and to political-cation committees, Mayer reports.

Adopting the strategy of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire libertarians, Mercer enlarged his impact exponentially by combining short-term campaign spending with long-term ideological investments. He poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News, and—in what David Magerman has called “an extreme example of modern entrepreneurial philanthropy”—made donations to dozens of politically tinged organizations.

Mayer describes Breitbart News, in which Mercer has invested $10 million, thusly: “The Web site freely mixes right-wing political commentary with juvenile rants and racist innuendo; under Bannon’s direction, the editors introduced a rubric called Black Crime.” Under the supervision of Rebekah Mercer, the family’s private foundation gave millions of dollars to interconnected nonprofit groups, several of which played crucial roles in propagating attacks on Hillary Clinton, $24.5 million in 2015 alone.

Last summer when Paul Manfort was forced to resign as Trump’s campaign manager, writes Mayer,

Rebekah Mercer successfully pushed for a staff shakeup that led to the promotions of three people funded by the family: Bannon became the campaign’s C.E.O., Conway its manager, and [David] Bossie [leader of Citizens United] its deputy manager. William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and an adamant Trump opponent, warned, “It’s the merger of the Trump campaign with the kooky right.”

Are you depressed/infuriated yet? Mayer ends the piece quoting an essay David Magerman wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, saying Mercer “has surrounded our President with his people, and his people have an outsized influence over the running of our country, simply because Robert Mercer paid for their seats.” He writes, “Everyone has a right to express their views.” But, he adds, “when the government becomes more like a corporation, with the richest 0.001% buying shares and demanding board seats, then we cease to be a representative democracy.” Instead, he warns, “we become an oligarchy.”

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A sick psyche is a closed system, like a lake infested with algae because the circulation of water is cut off. A healthy psyche is permeable, mutable, and liable to change and exchange, feeding on what supports life. Like all such systems, psychological health depends on the capacity to endure, which is the definition of sustainability. That capacity is enhanced whenever there is pleasure.

A horse won’t drink polluted water and will walk long distances to find another water hole; but a closed, sick psyche has lost that instinct, which explains why giving good advice inevitably fails with individuals who have come more or less adapted to toxic relationships. Their unsustainable relationships are the invested lake they call home.

An algae does not have the capacity to move out of the lake while a human does but before that person can move away from toxicity, the instinct that prevents the horse from drinking polluted water has to be reactivated. This is one way of describing the goal of psychotherapy; I like to imagine our lifelong quest for wisdom as a continuous process of detoxification, a moving away from situations and relationships that can’t support life.

–Ginette Paris

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There is an adage on Capitol Hill that five letters from the district about a bill is cause for alarm, and 10 is a full-blown emergency. By those standards, a couple hundred Tea Partyers, besieging their elected officials in person, was a borderline apocalypse.

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The latest issue of RFD, the radical faerie digest, is rightfully dedicated to commemorating Mark Thompson, the visionary gay writer and editor who died last August at the age of 63.

As I say in my contribution to the issue:

The radical faerie world will always be indebted to Mark Thompson for his skill and generosity in chronicling the emergence of this gay spiritual movement as a professional journalist and as an observer-participant. He attended the legendary first “Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies” Labor Day weekend 1979 in the Arizona desert, convened by Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, and Don Kilhefner, and he wrote about it in Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, his ground-breaking anthology of writings that linked contemporary gay liberation thought to previous generations of gay visionary writing by the likes of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, and Gerald Heard. Few books ever published have had as big an impact on the gay world as Gay Spirit did. It emerged from and contributed to a hunger for deep exploration of gay people’s evolutionary purpose on the planet, and it spawned a small but important pocket of gay scholarship that manifest in essential titles such as Randy Conner’s Blossom of Bone and Walter L. Williams’ The Spirit and the Flesh.

I am pleased to have my short essay published alongside the work of many dear friends and colleagues, including Andrew Ramer, Winston Wilde, Robert Croonquist (Covelo), Keith Gemerek, Bo Young, Stephen Silha, and Leng Lim. You can find the magazine in the kind of bookstores that still carry small-press gay journals, or you find out how to order it online here.